We're in that odd stretch of a two-term presidency where folks take the reelection as a cue to move on, spend time with their families and cash in big time in the private sector.
Hillary is stepping aside and has some sort of blood clot on the brain. If she can recover from whatever her malady is, she's the heiress appariant for Obama. She'll be a tougher out than people think, especially when you recall that we'll be a quarter-century past Whitewater by the time 2016 kicks in.
In that vein, we're four decades removed from Winter Soldier and John Kerry's Vietnam era Pentagon-dissing. Sadly, the modern Kerry would be a decent Secretary of State for a liberal admiistration; he was seen as the internationalist good cop in 2004 when he lost to Dubya and would keep a bit of that cache in European capitals and other left-leaning terrain.
As a senator, he'd be hard to fillibuster, even with his 2004 campaign to bring modern fodder to the oppo file. It would also give the GOP a shot at getting Scott Brown back into the Senate in the by-election.
Oddly, the reach across the aisle done by Obama is the least well recieved, mainly beacuse he picked the most objectionable Republican this side of David Duke in Chuck Hagel. Hagel was a loud critic of the Iraq surge, a louder critic of Likud types and in the err-on-the-side-of-diplomacy side on Iran. Top if off with a tin ear to more-Zionist friends of Israel and a proper-for-a-Republican-at-the-time diss of Amb. Hormel's favored form of meat-packing and he's an accident waiting to happen, getting flak from conservatives, Jews and gays.
What does he have going for him, other than that he served in the military?
Jack Lew is an interesting pick for Treasury; the name looks Asian, but he's Jewish, Orthodox at that. He's a liberal technocrat, having done stints as Obama's chief of staff and OMB direction. He has his foes, but probably not enough to mount a filibuster; he's not toxic enough to keep 5 of the more moderate Republicans to vote for cloture and give the president a reasonable pick.
Hagel, on the other hand, might not have a majority if a few moderate and/or Jewish Democrats defect on the nomination. A filibuster might work on this one.
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